Saturday, June 25, 2011

A "diversity training" collaborationist who has seen the light

The blogger Mariatheproblem, now a staunch opponent of the "insane, totalitarian hate cult that demonizes straight white men," remembers when, some 18 years ago, she played the equivalent of concentration camp guard in a corporate diversity training "experience."

Our training consisted of participating in various “conscious-raising” exercises and then sharing our life experiences with our groups (we were, of course, subtley encouraged to talk about how oppressed we were by straight, white men.) The straight white men were encouraged to talk about how guilty they felt for “oppressing” everybody else. It was like something out of a Maoist “self-criticsm” circle–and, as we shall shortly see, there’s a good reason for this resemblance.

At one point, all of the straight white men in our group were forced to sit aside while the rest of us sat in a circle and wrote stuff on a whiteboard about how much we hated straight white men, and why (I am not making this up.) Everyone added all sorts of derogatory things about straight white men to the whiteboard, while the targets sat there and watched without being able to say anything in their defense. Some of those men were actually work buddies of mine–kind, decent men who had helped me in my career–and yet, due to the false camaraderie that the “diversity training” encouraged me to indulge in, I joined in and trashed them along with everybody else. (I am deeply ashamed of this BTW; I cringe when I think of my participation in that “exercise”, and I often wish I could track those guys down and apologize to each and every one of them profusely today.)

Diversity training isn't about helping the majority understand people of different backgrounds. It's not even limited to ideological indoctrination, although that's its most obvious face. No, worse: diversity training is instilling the habit of self-criticism and self-censorship in whites so deeply that it becomes automatic, unconscious.

While the process has achieved great refinement under the political correctness regime, it has been a weapon of the Left for a long time. The Soviet "show trials" of the 1930s were notable, among other things, for the victims' eagerness to confess their anti-Party sins.

In his delightful memoir titled Skip All That, English TV presenter Robert Robinson recalls doing newscasts for the BBC in the '70s: "There were special rules at the height of the violence in Northern Ireland -- never written down, of course, they never are, for if you leave people to guess at what they mustn't say you have the most effective censorship of all."

The technique involves piling absurdity on top of absurdity: "We were told that it was 'oppressive,' for example, for managers to expect that 'Hispanics' would show up on time at meetings, because their culture was more laid back and 'people-oriented' than the uptight, cold, Anglo-Saxon culture that founded the U.S.," Maria writes. After continued exposure to inversion of the common sense world, whites internalize the belief that anything they say or think could be dangerous. The lash of the victicrats is ever waiting to punish a show of mere disagreement, or innocently using a "wrong" word,with a member of the Protected Classes.

Thankfully, Maria has long since rebelled against the "totalitarian hate cult," which suggests that others can do the same.

Olympus, where the abode of the gods stands firm and unmoving forever, they say, and is notshaken with windsnor spattered with rains,nor does snow pile ever there, but the shining bright airstretches cloudless away,and the white lightglances upon it.

MONEY

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